T-Shirts I Have Known: Part Two

A few years ago, I wrote a piece for The Millions called “T-Shirts I Have Known,” in which I eulogized shirts that, throughout the course of my life, I had outgrown, discarded, or somehow lost track of. As I said then, “In exchange for [our t-shirts’] service — absorbing our sweat, airing our interests, starting our conversations — the least we can do is offer them tribute,” and I still believe that’s true. Though my first instinct is to consider such things in a tongue-in-cheek way — after all, they’re just shirts, for Christ’s sake — the truth is, they once meant something to me. The clothing we wear is a highly personal thing. And when I think of my old t-shirts, as silly as it sounds, they seem like old friends whom I’ll never again get to see. Here, then, are three more of my dearest short-sleeved companions.

“Mattingly 23” (1988-1990)
As a child, I was a devoted fan of the New York Yankees, and though the team spent most of the ’80s and early-90s stumbling through the lower reaches of the American League East, it still claimed a number of stars: Rickey Henderson, Dave Winfield, Ron Guidry, Dave Righetti. But to my young mind, none was greater than Don Mattingly, their quiet, mustachioed captain with the gorgeous home-run swing.

On one of my first trips to Yankee Stadium, my father bought me a navy-blue t-shirt that featured the team’s white interlocking “NY” on the left breast and the number 23 in thick block letters on the back. Above the number curled that beautiful surname, the one that represented excellence and gold gloves and heaps of RBIs: MATTINGLY.

If a t-shirt is a way to tell the world the sort of person you are and the sorts of things you like — certain bands, certain teams, certain multinational corporations — then “Mattingly 23” represented my introduction to such communication. Until then, I pretty much wore whatever my mother had hung in my bedroom closet. The t-shirt as personal declaration had never occurred to me. But when I put it on that day at the game — surrounded by hundreds of others who were wearing the very same thing — I felt the odd pleasure that comes with the knowledge that you are not only stating your case, but being understood.

I certainly didn’t think of it in such terms at the time, but “Mattingly 23” marked a minor turning point: it made me aware that something as trivial as clothing might mold others’ perceptions of me. This would be made painfully clear once I entered middle school, where a poorly-chosen outfit could confer pariah status and possibly wedgies. But on that summer day, those perceptions were all to the good: the other fans at the Stadium could see, with a glance, that I was part of the tribe. Thanks to my shirt, I belonged. If only those Yankees we’d cheered for hadn’t wound up in fifth place that year.

“Big Johnson Erection Company” (1990-1991)
To an 11-year-old desperate to inflict damage in the arms race of seventh-grade sexual obnoxiousness, “Big Johnson Erection Company” was a cotton nuclear bomb. The shirt’s back featured a cartoon illustration of a nerdy everyman, flanked by eager, big-breasted women and, in the background, a mass of construction equipment. “Big Johnson Erection Company: When we get it up, it stays up,” read the ostensibly clever slogan. It was talking about penises, you see.

The shirt — and the seemingly dozens of others that proliferated at the time (“Big Johnson’s Gym: Hang With the Huge!”) — now seems numbingly stupid, a potential signifier of our decline as a species. But to someone feeling his first clumsily amorous stirrings, Big Johnson shirts were a brilliant revelation. They dredged all the repulsive horniness from my preadolescent mind and splashed it across shirts that I could actually buy, for $12.99, from that sketchy place at the mall. “Big Johnson Erection Company” was more than a shirt. It was how I announced my regrettable eligibility as a viable sexual being.

It should be noted that, following the shirt’s purchase, it took me nearly two years to actually make out with a girl.

“Let’s Bury the Hatchet!” (1987)
Each year, the church I attended as a boy held its annual rummage sale — an occasion for me to enter its sepulchral “toy room” and sift through the detritus of worn board games and mangled Barbie dolls in hopes of finding some discarded gem: a G.I. Joe figure, a Transformer, a bag of Matchbox cars.

But I rarely found anything of value at the sale — that is, until 1987, when I discovered a treasure unlike any I’d ever imagined: a white t-shirt with the words “Let’s Bury the Hatchet!” emblazoned upon it in big black letters. Beside the motto was an actual rubber hatchet, roughly the size of a real one, that had been made to look as though it had been embedded in the wearer’s chest. To complete the effect, a painted-on bloodstain oozed from the grievous “wound.” It was incredible: violent, funny, bizarrely three-dimensional. I had to have it. Somehow, I persuaded my mother to pay the necessary dollar for the thing, and then I began to plan.

On my first day of third grade, I wore a plain blue-green sweatshirt to school, with “Let’s Bury the Hatchet!” tucked securely into the bottom of my backpack. I had taken care to hide it beneath my Trapper Keeper and notebook, as if smuggling in a brick of some potent Schedule 1 narcotic.

Towards the end of the day, I asked permission to get something from my backpack — one of my new pencils, or maybe an eraser — which hung in the cloakroom. My teacher, Mrs. Benjamin, said that I could go, and I hurried in, my heart beating. Suddenly alone, ragingly aware of my classmates and teacher just beyond the door, I took the t-shirt from my bag and switched it with the shirt I was wearing. I returned my backpack to its hook and reentered the classroom, covering the hatchet with both hands. Once I was safely seated at my desk, nervous and exhilarated, I took my hands away.

In my memory, awareness of the shirt spread slowly, then quickly blossomed into full-blown chaos. The kids closest to me were the first to see the hatchet and the blood, and they began to look at each other, tittering and pointing. I tried to act as though nothing was amiss — as if I had not, in fact, been savagely attacked in the cloakroom just a few seconds before. I kept my eyes ahead, apparently fascinated by whatever Mrs. Benjamin was writing on the chalkboard. Finally, annoyed by the burbling disruption, she turned to seek out its cause, and found it soon enough: a brown-haired boy in the center of the room, trying to suppress a grin, a fucking ax sticking out of his chest.

She roared at me to get back into the cloakroom and put my other shirt back on. Immediately. Most of my classmates were giggling, which was enough to ease my disappointment over the brevity of the prank. The entire episode had lasted just a minute and a half, if that. Perhaps because it was the first day of school, Mrs. Benjamin didn’t punish me, and my parents never found out about what I had done. But the incident did claim one significant victim. For years afterward, “Let’s Bury the Hatchet!” hung sadly in the far reaches of my closet, unwearable and unworn. Its rubber ax became stiff; its cotton gathered dust. Eventually, I outgrew it altogether and was forced to throw it away. Yet “Let’s Bury the Hatchet!” had served a noble purpose: it had made my teacher angry. That fact alone was well worth my mother’s dollar.

Bukowski’s third novel, the autobiographical Garbageman, is about Los Angeles trash collector Henry Chinaski, who, when not working for the city’s Public Works Authority, writes short stories on a broken typewriter in his grimy cold-water flat.

Now that the 2010 season has ended, it’s time to look at the off-season transactions that will shape next year’s division rivalries and pennant races. Here, then, are a few of baseball’s most notable available free agents.

With the literary and publishing landscapes in near-constant states of flux, once-familiar terms have come to seem unfamiliar (saying that you're "reading a book on your phone," for example, would, not so long ago, have been evidence of madness). With that in mind, we offer these baseline definitions for our ever-changing reading world.
Political Autobiography: An autobiography, often released during a campaign cycle, meant to portray its author as something other than the craven, amoral, failure-prone, friendless, cash-whore shitneck that he or she actually is.
Celebrity Autobiography: A way for a given celebrity to relate fascinating, behind-the-scenes stories in the inimitable voice of his or her disgruntled freelance ghostwriter.
Young Adult (Genre): Narratives that highlight their teenage characters’ struggles with totalitarian societies, supernatural creatures, and sustaining readers’ interest over three or more installments.
Historical Fiction (Genre): A literary genre in which authors may write about historical figures without remaining faithful to historical fact. (See Einstein Gleams the Cube, by E.L. Doctorow (Random House, 1991).)
Horror (Genre):Stephen King.
E.L. James: An inexplicable phenomenon, usually affecting one’s vision, which makes Stephenie Meyer look like Joan Didion.
Knausgård: To brood incessantly over seemingly trivial matters. (“Jim is in the study with the lights off, Knausgårding about the Celtics game.”)
Gladwell: To make a forceful, if tenuously supported, claim. (“Wait, you’re saying that Roe v. Wade led to the rise of independent hip-hop? Don’t Gladwell me, man.”)
Wuthering Heights: A method of killing any nascent interest in reading that a high-school student may have.
Go Set a Watchman: To reap an unscrupulous profit from the elderly and infirm. (“Gary sent his rich aunt a get-well card, but he’s just trying to Go Set a Watchman her.”)
Brick-and-Mortar Bookstore: A type of small business so unique and charming that Amazon.com -- online purveyors of dishwashers, tube socks, and lice shampoo -- is now attempting to make inroads in the market.
Library: A structure, often found in schools and municipalities, that houses rows of outdated computers, often surrounded by books.
Audiobook: A method for allowing John Lithgow to pay the taxes on his second vacation home.
Library Book: A system of delivering old receipts, ancient ketchup stains, and dry, flattened boogers from one patron to the next.
Hardcover Book: A product that encourages consumers to pay 14 extra dollars for two pieces of heavy cardboard.
Borrowed Book: An item which, when loaned to a friend or family member, will be returned as often as four percent of the time.
Epigraph: A chosen quote that appears before the first chapter of a book, generally written by a more skilled writer than the book’s actual author.
Blurb: Praise, often appearing on a book’s back cover, written in prose so purple as to distract from the fact that the blurb’s writer merely skimmed the book while watching television.
Author Photograph: A promotional image of an author, meant to portray its subject as something other than the sallow, computer-bound shut-in that he or she actually is.
Aspiring Novelist: A person often seen frowning worriedly into his or her sticker-covered laptop at any number of urban coffee shops.
Voracious Reader: A phrase meant to inform you of its speaker’s endless appetite for knowledge, learning, and being perceived as intelligent.
Internet Humorist: A person who overestimates his own propensity for humor, and is grievously enabled by the Internet’s need for cheap, disposable content.
Image Credit: Flickr/greeblie.

When The New York TimesT Magazine recently published a series of emails between Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer, reactions ran from bafflement to hostility at what seemed a particularly precious bit of high-level marketing (both had projects to promote). But as it turns out, Foer isn’t the only novelist with whom Portman pen-pals. Below are excerpts from a long-running email exchange the actress and director has enjoyed with Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and Cities of the Plain.
>> On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 3:44 PM, Natalie Portman wrote:
Let me begin by saying how incredibly gratifying our correspondence has been. In recent years, as I worked on translating Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, into my first film as a director, I constantly thought of artists whose work I aspire to, and — I say this with a fan’s self-consciousness — you were one of them. I thought if I could suffuse my film with the visceral nature of, say, Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, then I will have succeeded. Thematically, Oz’s book couldn’t be more different from your novels — but that propulsive feeling, that razor’s-edge sense: that’s the important thing.
I’d love to keep writing but it appears that my son is trying to jam his SpongeBob underwear down the garbage disposal. Such is the artist’s life, is it not?
>> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:12 PM, Cormac McCarthy wrote:
The boy is wise. Pressing the remains of a dying world into the steely void. Did the boy succeed? Did he shred them? Send them tattered through the murk, the sludgewaters below. The refuse of our age. Flowing to brownclotted rivers where corpses of things drift at brackish shores. Bloated and grinning. The grief of the empty sun. An idiot’s reckoning.
>> On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 2:02 PM, Natalie Portman wrote:
Luckily I got the underwear out of his hands before he could do any real damage, and he gave me the sweetest hug in apology. Being a mother is a great gift, a blessing, and there’s nothing I can say on the subject that hasn’t been said before. But, in part, I think that’s what’s so amazing about having a child: we can each experience this thing that feels so unique and special — and nobody else will ever be able to understand the depth of our feeling. It’s something that we all can do, yet when it happens, it feels exceedingly rare. Does that make sense? Or is motherhood just turning me into one of those unbearable, sentimental types?
>> On Sat, May 7, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Cormac McCarthy wrote:
Children with sharp small teeth, grasping fingers. Sucking life from all, as an inferno takes its oxygen from the blackening treefringe. As apt to evil as men, simply not grown to it. Their evil a pair of trousers too large yet to fit. But there will come an hour when the boy will know what he is capable of and he will weigh it and know that it is there. He will attire the trousers and they will fit him handsomely. His evil will emerge as a snake from its trembling nest.
>> On Sat, May 7, 2016 at 10:47 PM, Natalie Portman wrote:
My son and I were at a café in Paris last year — the Boulangerie Poilâne, on the Boulevard de Grenelle; if you’re ever there, you must try the chaussons aux pommes — and I caught him trying to pour salt in my café au lait! So, yes, I certainly know what you mean about children’s capacity for “evil”!
It’s funny — although I’ve been working in film since I was 11, it’s only now, working as a director, that I’m thinking of my own life in terms of “scenes” — I’m visualizing my boy’s attempt at ruining my coffee as a director, not as a mother, or as the person who the event actually happened to. As I think about it, I’m working out camera angles, lighting, everything. There’s so much more to directing a movie than there is to everyday life. In everyday life, you don’t have to think about what type of saltshaker will look best on-camera — it’s already there.
>> On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 5:20 PM, Cormac McCarthy wrote:
Salt. Scattered across the fields by marauding deathcults, necklaces of severed ears. Destroying all in their bleakening fury. Crops stunted and gray, harvest of locustshells. Farmers leaving their wrackened steads, moving through bluffnotches towards full nothingness. Asking an absent god what they endeavor to. Yearning for surrender, to offer bloodscabbed necks to the rusty scythe.
>> On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 2:11 PM, Natalie Portman wrote:
In a very small way, I feel like one of those exhausted farmers. On the one hand, I’m extremely tired from a long day of shooting. But on the other, I’m energized by my colleagues. I’m working with Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, and other wonderful actresses, and the end of each day is a little bit sad, because we know we’re that much closer to the end of our camaraderie. I want to get through this project — it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, professionally — but at the same time, I want it to last forever. Is that something you’ve encountered in your own work?
>> On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 11:04 AM, Cormac McCarthy wrote:
What is forever. The blasted plains. Low scarps of rock. Nothing upon them but carcasses and things to become carcasses. Bones and yellowed teeth, scattered bits of fur. Chronicles of nothing. A vulture lighting upon illfestered carrion. To tear at flesh, rancid spoors green in the fading day. Murders of crows massing in the branches beyond. Black night sky. A void where nothing breathes. Mute to the hoarse sufferings of an extincting race. Howls unheeded. Lodestars of pain. These things are forever.
There is nothing else, Natalie.
LOL TTYL.
More from Cormac McCarthy:The Road (A Comedic Translation)